Patricia Maclachlan

Biography

Patricia Maclachlan, who arrived at UT in 1997, is now Associate Professor of Government and Asian Studies.  She received her Ph.D in political science and Japan studies in 1996 from Columbia University and spent one year as a research associate in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University. Her research interests include consumer politics and culture in advanced industrial democracies, with a focus on Japan. She is now completing a book on the history and politics of the Japanese postal system.

Professor Maclachlan is the author of Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Advocacy (NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), and a co-editor and contributing author to The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). She has also written several articles and book chapters on consumer-related issues in Japan and the West, Japanese civil society, and on Japanese postal reform.

Courses taught: Politics in Japan; Japanese Foreign Policy; Civil Society in East Asia (graduate seminar); Intro to International Relations of E and SE Asia; Perspectives on Japanese Culture; Consumption in East Asia; Japanese Politics (graduate seminar).